| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: find you anywhere. You may stay here--or go. There is no room for
you in this world."
Ready now to depart, she yet wandered aimlessly about the room,
putting the bottles on the shelf, trying to fit with trembling hands
the covers on cardboard boxes. Whenever the real sense of what she had
heard emerged for a second from the haze of her thoughts she would
fancy that something had exploded in her brain without, unfortunately,
bursting her head to pieces--which would have been a relief. She blew
the candles out one by one without knowing it, and was horribly
startled by the darkness. She fell on a bench and began to whimper.
After a while she ceased, and sat listening to the breathing of her
Tales of Unrest |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: so, no matter what it may cost me in the end. See!" And with that he
put his left foot on the duke's breast, took the broken wooden end of
the lance in his fingers, shook and loosened it by degrees in the
wound, and finally succeeded in drawing out the iron head, as if he
were handling a thing and not a man. Though he saved the prince by
this heroic treatment, he could not prevent the horrible scar which
gave the great soldier his nickname,--Le Balafre, the Scarred. This
name descended to the son, and for a similar reason.
Absolutely masters of Francois II., whom his wife ruled through their
mutual and excessive passion, these two great Lorrain princes, the
duke and the cardinal, were masters of France, and had no other enemy
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Shone with the smooth and slippery polish
That tells the snake. That night he drifted
Into an up-town haunt and ordered --
Whatever it was -- with a soft assurance
That made me mad as I stood behind him,
Gripping his death, and waited. Coward,
I think, is the name the world has given
To men like me; but I'll swear I never
Thought of my own disgrace when I shot him --
Yes, in the back, -- I know it, I know it
Now; but what if I do? . . . As I watched him
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: as he says, he transferred the Socratic universal of ethics to the whole of
nature.
The other criticism of Parmenides on Socrates attributes to him a want of
practice in dialectic. He has observed this deficiency in him when talking
to Aristoteles on a previous occasion. Plato seems to imply that there was
something more in the dialectic of Zeno than in the mere interrogation of
Socrates. Here, again, he may perhaps be describing the process which his
own mind went through when he first became more intimately acquainted,
whether at Megara or elsewhere, with the Eleatic and Megarian philosophers.
Still, Parmenides does not deny to Socrates the credit of having gone
beyond them in seeking to apply the paradoxes of Zeno to ideas; and this is
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